Tyrone Williams

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A Little Coffee In A Saucer

cools
as it pools
over

faux
porcelain.
I grip

lift
the dish a
little

with
fingertips
as brown

lips
descend—pursed
to send

cool
warmth across
a thin

black
shiver I
cold sip.

History, History, All is History

Dreaming has been confiscated…

In the lawn around an island of sycamores the roots are starting to show.

Throw a few bags of denial on ‘em, says the tree man.

After your screams finally became ambulatory, I could no longer slip into the trance of another life, needing your horror here to be unheard.

A patch of Yankee know-how updates the trick.

Having resigned ourselves to one another we refastened our seatbelts as we descended through the clouds, touching down to taxi the tarmac indefinitely.

…but the dream cannot be stopped.

 

* italicized lines from the documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), and, with Pat Clifford, washpark (Delete Press, 2021). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019).
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.